Easily Upload Photos With Flickr’s New Drag-and-Drop Tools

Flickr's slick new HTML5 uploader.Photo sharing service Flickr has announced a new HTML5-based photo uploader with drag-and-drop support and a better interface for adding captions, titles and other annotations to your uploaded images.

The new HTML5 photo uploading tool comes on the heels of Flickr’s recent move away from the Flash-based Picnik photo editor to a new HTML5-based image editor. Not only is the new uploader faster and better, it adds further foundation to the hope of Flickr fans everywhere — that, despite some recent personnel changes at Yahoo, the company still believes in and will continue to develop Flickr.

Despite the advances the web has made over the years, uploading files remains a clunky, confusing process for many users who always want to know why they can’t just drag and drop files like they do everywhere else. Like Gmail’s similar drag-and-drop file uploader, that’s exactly what Flickr users can now do, provided of course they’re using a supported web browser. Flickr’s new uploading tool will work in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

The switch to an HTML5-based photo uploading tool means that you can now simply select a group of images on your hard drive, drag them over to your browser and drop them on the Flickr page. From there the uploader offers a revamped photo organizer page that now sports a darker look reminiscent of the interface in Adobe’s Lightroom editor. Click on an image and the left-hand sidebar will show fields for adding a title, description and tags to your image. You can also add the image to a set, tag any people that appear in the photo, as well as control privacy settings or change the license.

The new Flickr uploader's large image previews

To go along with the new uploader Flickr has also bumped the file size limits for both pro and ordinary users to 50MB and 30MB, respectively. For Flickr pros that’s enough space to handle photos taken with the latest DSLRs, though it’s worth noting that Flickr still doesn’t support storing RAW images.

Still, Flickr remains one of the web’s most popular photo sharing sites and while the new uploader and larger file size limits may not win it any converts from elsewhere, it should make current users happy. Note that, as with previous upgrades, Flickr will be rolling out the new uploader over the next week or so, if you don’t see it just yet, fear not, it’s coming.

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